The Real Cool Killers Read Online Free Page A

daze. After a moment he added, “I can’t feel sorry for him. I tell you, Digger, death is on any son of a bitch who tries to throw acid into my eyes again.”
    “Smell yourself, man,” Grave Digger said.
    Coffin Ed bent his head. The front of his dark wrinkled suit reeked with the scent of dime-store perfume.
    “That’s what he threw. Just perfume,” Grave Digger said. “I tried to warn you.”
    “I must not have heard you.”
    Grave Digger took a deep breath. “God damn it, man, you got to control yourself.”
    “Well, Digger, a burnt child fears fire. Anybody who tries to throw anything at me when they’re under arrest is apt to get shot.”
    Grave Digger said nothing.
    “What happened to our prisoner?” Coffin Ed asked.
    “He got away,” Grave Digger said.
    They turned in unison and surveyed the scene.
    Patrol cars were arriving by the minute, erupting cops as though for an invasion. Others had formed blockades across Lenox Avenue at 128th and 126th Streets, and had blocked off 127th Street on both sides.
    Most of the people had gotten off the street. Those that stayed were being arrested as suspicious persons. Several drivers trying to move their cars were protesting their innocence loudly.
    The packed bars in the area were being rapidly sealed bythe police. The windows of tenements were jammed with black faces and the exits blocked by police.
    “They’ll have to go through this jungle with a fine-toothed comb,” Grave Digger said. “With all these white cops about, any colored family might hide him.”
    “I’ll want those gangster punks too,” Coffin Ed said.
    “Well, we’ll just have to wait now for the men from homicide.”
    But Lieutenant Anderson arrived first, with the harness sergeant and Detective Haggerty latched on to him. The five of them stood in a circle in the car’s headlights between the two corpses.
    “All right, just give me the essential points first,” Anderson said. “I put out the flash so I know the start. The man hadn’t been killed when I got the first report.”
    “He was dead when we got here,” Grave Digger said in a flat, toneless voice. “We were the first here. The suspect was standing over the victim with the pistol in his hand–”
    “Hold it,” a new voice said.
    A plain-clothes lieutenant and a sergeant from downtown homicide bureau came into the circle.
    “These are the arresting officers,” Anderson said.
    “Where’s the prisoner?” the homicide lieutenant asked.
    “He got away,” Grave Digger said.
    “Okay, start over,” the homicide lieutenant said.
    Grave Digger gave him the first part then, went on:
    “There were two friends with him and a group of teenage gangsters around the corpse. We disarmed the suspect and handcuffed him. When we started to frisk the gangster punks we had a rumble. Coffin Ed shot one. In the rumble the suspect got away.”
    “Now let’s get this straight,” the homicide lieutenant said.
    “Were the teenagers implicated too?”
    “No, we just wanted them as witnesses,” Grave Digger said. “There’s no doubt about the suspect.”
    “Right.”
    “When I got here Jones and Johnson were fighting, rolling all over the corpse,” Haggerty said. “Jones was trying to disarm Johnson.”
    Lieutenant Anderson and the men from homicide looked at him, then turned to look at Grave Digger and Coffin Ed in turn.
    “It was like this,” Coffin Ed said. “One of the punks turned up his ass and farted toward me and–”
    Anderson said, “Huh!” and the homicide lieutenant said incredulously, “You killed a man for farting?”
    “No, it was another punk he shot,” Grave Digger said in his toneless voice. “One who threw perfume on him from a bottle. He thought it was acid the punk was throwing.”
    They looked at Coffin Ed’s acid-burnt face and looked away embarrassedly.
    “The fellow who was killed is an Arab,” the sergeant said.
    “That’s just a disguise,” Grave Digger said. “They belong to a group